It’s been a busy day. I came home from church this morning and ran an errand, then spent the afternoon painting the hall while Ron watched football and waited for sunset so we could go out and harvest honey from our beehive.
Our neighbor to the south and his little boy saw us in our bee suits and stood at the back edge of their property, watching us swap out a half-dozen frames. While we had the hive open, we laid a mesh bag of menthol pellets on top of the frames on the uppermost super to repel varroa mites. The bees were not terribly happy with us, but our suits protected us — and them — from stings.
We brought the frames inside, scraped the honey — comb and all — out of them, and put it in sieves over big mixing bowls on my desk next to the woodstove. The idea is for the warmth of the stove to make the honey thin so it will drain into the bowls, leaving the wax behind in the sieves. We’ve filled 18 half-pint Mason jars so far, and I think we’ve got about that much more in the bowls, waiting for me to get offline and put it up. It’s the best honey we’ve ever harvested. No wonder the girls were so aggressive about protecting it all summer….
I’m trying to work up the nerve to process the beeswax, which appears to be a simple process but apparently involves a fairly high risk of fire — which only makes my borderline pyro self that much more interested in trying it. I’ll let you know how it goes, assuming I manage to pull it off without burning the house down. 😉
Hope your weekend was as productive and enjoyable as mine.
Emily
P.S.: Ron shot the photos in today’s post. And no, I’m not filling honey jars with my eyes shut in that first picture, although that would be a pretty impressive trick if I could pull it off. Ron says I was looking down at the jar, but I think he just caught me mid-blink. Either way, I look like a dork, but the honey was so gorgeous I had to post the picture anyway….
Red Fork Hippie 